KUMAR SANGAKKARA’S international career, which ends this weekend in Colombo after 15 years, has been a monument not only to his immense talent but also a capacity for hard work and application.
Talented Asian batsmen have not always been willing to occupy the difficult positions at the top of the order if there’s a chance of living more comfortably at No 4 or No 5, let alone put in the yards in the gym or in the field, but he has been a striking exception to the rule. He pushed himself in his pursuit of perfection and for doing the right thing by his team.
Only five international cricketers have made more than 550 appearances in Tests, ODIs and Twenty20s combined and Sangakkara is the only one who was not purely a batsman. He kept wicket in 464 of his 594 matches.
Sangakkara effectively had two careers, either of which would have satisfied most people. One was as a wicketkeeper-batsman, a role he filled pretty much for his entire one-day career (360 of his 404 ODIs and in all 56 of his Twenty20s), and for most of his Test career up until 2008.
He scored 17,840 runs at an average of 41.9, more runs than was managed by Adam Gilchrist (15,252) or MS Dhoni (14,345), or any other long-serving stumper on the international scene.
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In addition to that, he also had a hugely successful second career purely as a batsman, mainly in more recent times in Tests when he generally batted in the pivotal and highly demanding position of No 3. His record here is immense: after the first innings of his farewell game at the P Sara Oval, it amounted to 10,158 runs in 130 matches at an average of 59.1.
In Test matches alone in which he played only as a batsman, Sangakkara averages 67.1, second only to Don Bradman.
Two specific factors contributed to this extraordinary body of work. One was his scholarly attention to detail. As a man who trained as a lawyer, he possesses the kind of forensic mind necessary to calibrate his methods to the myriad pitches and bowlers he found himself keeping wicket to and batting against.
Those who have worked closely with him have described the minute adjustments he would fret over until they were absolutely right, and the results were there to see: he scored hundreds in 10 of the 11 countries in which he played Tests and the only place he missed out was the West Indies, where he batted just seven times. Not many Asians can have played 24 Tests in England, Australia and South Africa and come away with an average well above 40.
In the way of the best modern players, Sangakkara essentially developed a method that worked for him whether he was playing a 20-overs match or a Test match.
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The other factor in his success was his view of the game as more than a game and the part he believed the leading cricketers ought to play in society in Sri Lanka, a country torn until recently by a civil war spanning a quarter of a century.
“The Sri Lanka team is unique because of what we represent,” he said in an interview with this newspaper last year. “We have all ethnicities and religions, playing together, performing together. That is what every Sri Lankan wants, what Sri Lanka wants. Post-2009 [when the war ended], it is even more important that we continue to represent that ideal. The way we carry ourselves on and off the field is very important.
“It’s more than just being a professional cricketer. They [the public] expect a bit more from us. Sometimes it seems a bit unfair, but it’s not.”
Sangakkara is not quite done as a player. He will shortly rejoin Surrey, a club that could finish the season with two trophies, and is contracted to return to help them on their return to the championship first division in 2016. He gives value for money wherever he goes.
It will be interesting to see in what direction he goes after that. During a short spell as captain which ended with Sri Lanka’s defeat in the 2011 World Cup final, he had his run-ins with his country’s cricket administration, where politics is as much a consideration as sport, and he subsequently gave a withering critique of how the game was run when he delivered the Cowdrey Lecture soon after. He is unafraid to speak his mind.
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It would be a great thing if he could now be persuaded to involve himself in cricket administration at ICC level. Although the levers of power have been seized by India, England and Australia, they were taken in part because those who ran the game in other regions forfeited their claim through incompetence, disinterest, or worse.
Sangakkara has the credibility to speak for those outside the “Big Three”, as well as the players, many of whom are being broken on the anvil of an unrelenting schedule.